"So many people surged to the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center website that it slowed to a crawl early Friday, unable to provide critical information to the public about the coastal impact in the U.S. of a massive earthquake in Japan.

Until technicians were able to increase the bandwidth of the Alaska-based weather website, it failed as an information linchpin for hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people on the California, Oregon and Washington coasts looking for life-and-death tsunami information."

Erika Bolstad reports for McClatchy Newspapers March 11, 2011. [2]

SEE ALSO:

"Proposed GOP Budget Cuts Target Tsunami Warning Centers" (CBS News) [3]

"GOP Budget Targets Agency That Warned of Tsunami" (Associated Press) [4]